Making sure your email is available on your smart phone or tablet

Q. I received a Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 tablet as a gift and I am having trouble with my email. I will have 10 messages on my desktop computer and a few and sometimes none on my tablet. I have had emails pop up on my tablet, then disappear somewhere. They do not go into the Trash folder or anywhere else. The one’s I do receive go away after a time without me deleting them. What is happening?

A. Tablet and smartphone devices will only show you the email you have on the mail server that hosts your email. If you have your computer set up to check your email and it is configured to delete mail from the server after downloading the email to your computer, it will no longer be available to your tablet or smart phone.

Your best options would be to either reconfigure your computer mail program to leave mail on the server for a few days, or convert your mail configuration to IMAP rather than POP. IMAP will leave your mail on the server until you manually delete your messages.

Check with your email provider for instructions on configuring your mail client and also to find out their policies on managing your email as many providers do not want you leaving all of your mail on their servers.